Donald L. Bitzer

The Wide World of Computer-Based Education

Publisher Summary Man has always striven to invent tools and machines to increase his productivity. While the industrial revolution has made material goods available to a large segment of the population, some service-oriented sectors of the economy still remain essentially labor-intensive. The needs for help in the educational field are clear. The cost of education has increased rapidly, but the number of students who must be considered nonfunctional in our modern technological society has risen. Not only have the complexities of a modern society increased the demand for better education, but they have also caused frequent retraining to meet the needs of the rapidly changing job opportunities. To give a better idea of how a computer is used in the instructional process, a detailed description of a computer-based education system will be given and illustrated with various instructional examples. Although many types of systems are in use today, the PLATO system, which represents an advanced state of the art, is discussed in this chapter. This system also represents the longest continuous work in the field. The operation of hundreds of graphics terminals simultaneously at distances from the computer of a few hundred feet to hundreds of miles necessitates a highly efficient and unique system architecture, as shown in this chapter. No matter how flexible the terminal or how sophisticated the computer processing, the quality of instruction is still greatly dependent on the caliber of the lesson material. The next section of this chapter discusses the various computational applications. The development of the TUTOR language, which made it possible for the classroom teachers to write these materials and was initiated and directed by Paul Tenczar at the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory, is discussed here. The chapter also discusses the ongoing continuous evaluation and cost of services.

PLATO: A computer-based system used in the engineering of education

Research results obtained with the PLATO computer-based education systems, developed at the University of Illinois, indicate that computer technology can be effectively applied to some of the problems of our present educational system. The research results and system designs reported are based upon studies in computer-based education which have included over 150 000 student contact hours of credited instruction in a variety of subjects and educational levels. The discussions concerning computer-based instruction are divided into two major areas: first, the science of computer-based education and second, the engineering of computer-based education. Also included are a description of some new hardware developments which are necessary to the realization of an economically viable system, and a discussion of the economic and educational considerations which should influence the design of any computer-based education system.

Teaching nursing by computer: An evaluative study

Abstract This paper describes an experiment in teaching nursing by computer to over 300 studient nurses from diploma and associate degree programs. A complete course of 22 lessons in maternity nursing and a series of 11 pharmacology lessons were written and taught on PLATO III using a self-directed inquiry teaching strategy. Evaluative studies of teaching effectiveness, retention, relationship of process variables to student achievement and student and instructor acceptance were performed. The results of these studies are described.

The Plato System: Current Research and Developments

The Plato system is discussed. Current research activities are described, including research in teaching methods. New content areas and future developments are pointed out.

Reliability and availability of a wide area network-based education system

An important class of quality of service (QoS)-dependent network-based applications are computer-based education systems. A successful network-based education (NBE) system needs to provide appropriate QoS at the user level. This includes adequate end-to-end response delay and adequate system reliability and availability. This paper presents results from a reliability and availability evaluation of NovaNET. NovaNET is a successful low-overhead multimedia education system which serves thousands of users on a daily basis. We analyze eight years of failure data and examine correlations among system failure events. The NovaNET data are used to discuss practical bounds on the reliability and availability of an NBE system.

The Early Age of Social Computing

The social computing applications of today are a constant of everyday life, connecting people on a local to global scale. With a large variety of computer and display choices now available and a number of communication companies to provide their interconnect services, users can download thousands of application packages to meet their individual needs. This ease of entering the social computing market has been the result of an evolutionary process over the past 50 years.

A large-scale facility for university instruction

The basic premise of the program has been that the existing technology of the 1960s was not capable of providing a significant and economically practical contribution to the nations educational program. The goals of PLATO have therefore been twofold: first, to investigate the potential role of the computer in the instructional process; second, to design an economically and educationally viable system incorporating the most valuable approaches to teaching and learning developed in the investigation.